Twitter has to give Elon Musk documents from former product head Beykpour - The Verge

A Delaware judge ruled that Elon Musk’s lawyers will receive documents from Twitter’s former head of product, Kayvon Beykpour, ahead of a trial over his attempt to exit their $44 billion acquisition agreement.

Elon Musk’s lawyers notched a partial win this week in their Delaware Court of Chancery standoff against Twitter with a motion requesting information from 22 Twitter employees, or “custodians,” in addition to 41 others that both sides already agreed on for sharing data. Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled on the issue Monday afternoon, deciding Twitter has to “collect, review, and produce documents” from just one of the people listed: Kayvon Beykpour, the former head of consumer product at Twitter.

With the October 17th trial date for Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk for trying to break up their $44 billion deal drawing closer — and Musk selling billions of dollars worth of his stock in Tesla — his lawyers are trying to find something to shore up their arguments that Twitter committed fraud, while Twitter’s legal team issues subpoenas to help out the case on their side. Insider reports, based on anonymous sourcing, that Musk’s lawyers were pursuing information from Twitter employees who ranged from mid-level execs to lower-level employees, and noted that his legal team filed another motion to compel pursuing info on Twitter’s user data, as well as the methods used to collect and analyze it.

As described in a lengthy countersuit (that Twitter already responded to), they argue the company put walls in the way of Musk’s attempts to verify data about how many daily active users are actually bots, as Musk disputes the company’s claim that spam bots account for fewer than 5 percent of the accounts it measures.

Related

When Beykpour appeared on our Decoder podcast last year to talk about Twitter’s upcoming plans, we described him as “responsible for deciding what tools Twitter actually builds for people to express themselves.” Those tools included things like Super Follows, the live audio Spaces rooms, and its Revue newsletters.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/16/23309024/elon-musk-twitter-lawsuit-bot-spam-kayvon-beykpour

---